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About Convivial

Convivial gives editors and designers the ability to easily build attractive, flexible Drupal 8 websites. It exposes the best bits of Drupal and handles the complexity users don't want to see.

The team at Morpht have been working away at a starter kit since early 2016. We have been striving to build a rock solid Drupal 8 distribution which will enable the rapid development of Drupal 8 websites. We have taken a component driven approach to development to ensure that the system can be easily extended and that site builders are supported in adding the features they need. We have also focused on the needs of site owners and have innovated with a looks and modifiers approach which allows for the rapid development of new skins for sites.

Modifiers and Looks

Modifiers and looks are new concepts in the Drupal community. They combine together to form a system which allows for extremely rapid development of new appearances of you site. This makes them perfect for use on subsections, microsites, groups, marketing sites and site factory arrangements.

Some definitions

Modifier: An object which is able to modify the JS, CSS, classes and styles of an element on a page. It is a reusable vehicle for mobilising many of the powerful theming capabilities of Drupal. Modifiers can be applied to any element on a page including page regions (body, header, footer) and components (view modes, forms, etc). Modifiers are very powerful and can attach Javascript libraries to achieve some impressive enhancements very quickly.

Look: A way of collecting and storing configuration for different modifiers. Users can select and configure Modifiers to apply to different elements on the page. A look sits on top of a theme and augments the appearance of that theme.

Look Mappings: The look modifiers are mapped down into elements on the page via look mappings. This gives the site builder the ability to target any element and modify it as they wish.

A range of modifiers have been developed thus far including:

colors

fonts

corners

image fx

background image

background video

background parallax

These modifiers combine to allow for a lot of creative flexibility.

Open Source

The Look and Modifiers code has not yet been released as open source Drupal 8 modules under the GPL. We are currently undertaking some refactoring work to improve the packaging and use of the code. The release will include all code for managing looks and modifiers. It will also include a pack of modifier plugins which will make it easy to get up and running. All you need to do is wire the system together via the Looks Mappings for your theme.

We expect to have this work completed by Augest 2017.

Greater than the sum of its parts

Convivial is more than the sum of its parts. It brings together the ingredients of Lightning, Media, Look, Modifiers, View Modes, Layouts and many other things to deliver a turn key starting point for building sites. We currently use it for many of the builds we make. If you would like to start a project on it, please contact us.

Convivial

A CMS distribution implemented by Morpht. Based on Drupal 8, Lightning, Bootstrap and the innovative Modifiers and Look modules.